Monday, 3 June 2013

Thatcher on Thatcherism: Using her own Words to Evaluate her Decade

You know I feel a problem with trying to get objective history when dealing with overtly political figures and events is that ultimately the validity of the argument is dependent upon the political views and preconceived notions already held by the audience.

So in an attempt at fairness I'll try to overcome my own personal baggage and analyse Mrs T based on her own stated goals. I am old enough to remember the Thatcher years and that it was promoted and defended on the promise of three main goals, lower unemployment, an end to dependence upon the state and a freer society for all. So lets see how well she did shall we?

Unemployment

Margaret Thacther came to power in May 1979 and left in November 1990. Thats just over 11 years more then enough time to improve the unemployment rate. In fact so concerned with the unemployment was she that it became the defining policy of her election campaign.

Quite hard to misinterpret

Apparently not, in 1979 the unemployment rate was 1.1 million but rose to over 3 million in 1982 but started falling towards the end of year rule but was still higher then when she left it. So we can see that's strike one for Thactherism.

An end to State Dependency

Another frequent message in speeches and Party Election adverts was the idea that "freeing" the Market (even if in practice we replaced a State monopoly with a private one) would free the people. In short this would mean an end to dependency upon the state. How did she do? Well not very well I'm afraid, as we've already established unemployment jumped and remained very high during her rule. In Capitalist society the only way for a person to be functionally independent is to be financially independent, and you can't be financially independent if you don't have a job.

In addition Maggie passed a lot of legislation that increased the power of the state and undermined the independence of civil society and local government.

The Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 introduced a new 'block
grant' and compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) for direct labour
organisations. The block grant allowed the government to impose grant
penalties on councils which exceeded expenditure targets

Powers were taken away from local government in London Docklands and
Merseyside and, instead, development corporations were imposed.
Enterprise zones, with tax breaks, were also introduced. Michael
Heseltine, as Thatcher's environment secretary, oversaw an
interventionist style of urban regeneration which has proved influential
ever since.

Rate-capping, which restricted the spending of councils, on the other
hand utterly divided local and central government. Even Conservative
councils and leaders were opposed, though it was a number of radical
urban Labour leaders who decided to adopt a policy of not setting a rate. Councils such as Sheffield, Liverpool, Islington, Lambeth and Haringey set out towards illegality as part of a rebellious strategy to confront the Thatcher government and generate mass opposition.

Her famous Trade Union legislation made it much harder for workers to organise and then effectively apply pressure to their bosses. Secondary picketing was outlawed, so your buggered if your workplace has more then one Union operating or more then one facility. And breaches of these laws run the risk of confiscation of Union funds and resources. This means that working class people had one of their most effective means of demonstrating independence significantly reduced.

Speaking of working people her taxation policies in particular the infamous Poll Tax took disproportionately affected those on lower incomes. This meant that for those not making six figure incomes had to pay a much higher share of the tax burden further limiting their financial independence.

The present rating system is based on property owners, both domestic and
commercial, with the largest burden for local government expenditure
falling on industry, commerce, middle and upper classes and grants from
central government. The present government is totally opposed to this
system and the implementation of the Poll Tax is the final part of a
strategy to shift the burden of local government expenditure onto the
local population, i.e. the working class. Through the reduction of
central government grants, as seen in Scotland, where over the last 10
years grants have dropped from 75% of local government expenditure in
1975/6 to 55% inn 1987/8. By using the threat of "rate capping",4
a system where local authorities had their grants further cut on the
excuse of over expenditure, the burden was even further shifted onto
local ratepayers.

Then there were the morality and censorship Acts or sections of Acts, her government was fond of putting tangential requirements in broader legislation. A good example of this is Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988. Section 28 stated that a local council and its affiliated services will not "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". Because of this addition Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual support groups in many areas that worked with Council services had to wind down their activities or break their links with local government. This style of arbitrary authoritarianism was pretty standard procedure for the self proclaimed champion of the individual.

And then there was her best friends internationally, after Reagans America the two nations Thatcher was closest to were Chile and Apartheid South Africa, hardly bastions of small government. Now Thatcher's remarks about Mandela calling him a terrorist is one of the few areas where even her apologists will acknowledge to be a mistake. But for some reason far more important economic and political links between London and Pretoria have been swept under the rug.

Under Thatcher’s eleven-year term as Prime Minister, Britain remained
the main political and economic backer of apartheid South Africa. In
its 1985 pamphlet on South Africa, the Revolutionary Communist Group,
which helped to found City Group, described how Britain benefited from
investments in South Africa.
‘British companies’ stake in apartheid gives an average
rate of profit of some 21 per cent. This is extremely high compared to a
6-7 per cent average return on investment in Britain. So it is no
surprise that 500 British companies invest in South Africa…British banks
and companies earned £1bn last year from their investments in
apartheid…Shell and BP control 40 per cent of oil sales in South
Africa…British banks had claims of $5.562bn (£4.7bn) on South Africa
(end June 1984), a rise of $1.02bn (£0.92bn) or 22.5 per cent on the
previous year. Britain’s stake in apartheid is enormous. And precisely
because investment in apartheid is so profitable, British collaboration
with apartheid will not be easily broken.’

I could go on but I think its save to say this is strike two for Thatcherism.

Greater Civil Liberties

In addition to her attacks on the ability of people to express their independence from her government and world view in general this "Champion of freedom" attacked civil liberties throughout the country. The powers of the police were increased to such an extent that they were given the nickname "Thatchers army" since they operated like an invasion force.

According to the MI5 whistleblower Cathy Massiter, some 300
anti-nuclear, union and civil liberties activists were the targets of
government surveillance.
Thatcher’s spies justified surveillance of domestic political
opponents by saying there were Soviet sympathizers trying to infiltrate
those groups. That may, or may not, have been true. But those arguments
were also used by Thatcher’s friend in Chile, the brutal dictator
Augusto Pinochet. They were used by her friends in the apartheid
government of South Africa.

There was also increased censorship in the media, a rather strange policy of Thatchers relating to Northern Ireland has been called the "Oxygen of Publicity" initiative, after a speech she gave in 1985. Basically this was an attempt to censor extremist groups without actually censoring them. That sounds daft because it is, what this actually entailed was if a member of a group deemed to be connected to terrorism in Northern Ireland the media could still report their statements but not with their own voices. A way around this ban was to either subtitle them or get someone to dub over them.

The broadcasting ban, or 'Restrictions' as they were officially
known, extended to 11 republican and loyalist organisations believed to
support terrorism, but many believed that Sinn Féin and the IRA were the
main targets.
At best, it could be said that it was a half-hearted censorship.
Newspapers would be permitted to carry statements from those
organisations, and television news programmes would be permitted to show
images of spokesmen at press conferences, but their voices would have
to be removed.
With 20 years' worth of hindsight, Douglas Hurd now says he accepts that the ban soon became enormously counter-productive.
Not least because broadcasters quickly found a way to subvert the
terms of the new law by having actors re-voice the words spoken by Sinn
Féin spokesmen.

In effect this weird censorship policy failed but it did succeed in frustrating those groups and make negotiations and dialogue with the public more difficult.

So that's strike three.

Addendum

There's also a qoute by Mrs T that her supporters just love to copy and paste to prove her freedom loving nature.

"Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as
they say it. We all know what they really mean—power over people, power
to the State."